Architecture and environment

by Hassan Fathy

Since antiquity, man has reacted to his environment, using
his faculties to develop techniques and technologies, whether to
bake bread or make brick, in such internal psychological balance
with nature that humanity historically lived attuned to the
environment. Man's creations were natural when built of the
materials offered by the landscape.

Learning to manipulate clay, stone, marble, and wood, man
penetrated their properties, and his techniques gave expression
to his aspirations toward the divine. In architecture,
environmental harmony was known to the Chinese, the Indians, the
Greeks, and others. It produced the temples of Karnak, the great
mosques of Islam, and the cathedral of Chartres in France.

With the advent of the industrial revolution, the inherited
techniques and perfected knowledge of creating, using handmade
tools, were lost and are now forgotten. Energy-intensive
mechanized tools have diminished man's personal, cellular
contribution to the fabrication of objects, the building of
structures, and the growing of food. The lesser the challenge for
man to imprint his genius, the less artistic is the product.

The resulting economic and political disturbances are
visible today. Production of beauty, once the prerogative of
millions, is replaced by industrialization, even of bread, under
the control of a minority of owners. The negative consequences of
the industrial revolution have disturbed the natural organization
of the divine concept for humanity.

Sixty years of experience have shown me that
industrialization and mechanization of the building trade have
caused vast changes in building methods with varying applications
in different parts of the world. Constant upheaval results when
industrially developed societies weaken the craft-developed
cultures through increased communications. As they interact,
mutations create societal and ecological imbalance and economic
inequities which are documented to be increasing in type and
number.

Profoundly affected is the mass of the population, which is
pressured to consume industrially produced goods. The result is
cultural, psychological, moral, and material havoc.

Yet it is this population that has an intimate knowledge of
how to live in harmony with the local environment. Thousands of
years of accumulated expertise has led to the development of
economic building methods using locally available materials,
climatization using energy derived from the local natural
environment, and an arrangement of living and working spaces in
consonance with their social requirements. This has been
accomplished within the context of an architecture that has
reached a very high degree of artistic expression.

At all costs, I have always wanted to avoid the attitude too
often adopted by professional architects and planners: that the
community has nothing worth the professionals' consideration,
that all its problems can be solved by the importation of the
sophisticated urban approach to building. If possible, I want to
bridge the gulf that separates folk architecture from architect's
architecture. I always wanted to provide some solid and visible
link between these two architectures in the shape of features,
common to both, in which the people could find a familiar point
of reference from which to enlarge their understanding of the
new, and which the architect could use to test the truth of his
work in relation to the people and the place.

An architect is in a unique position to revive people's
faith in their own culture. If, as an authoritative critic, he
shows what is admirable in local forms, and even goes so far as
to use them himself, then the people at once begin to look on
their own products with pride. What was formerly ignored or even
despised becomes suddenly something to be proud of. It is
important that this pride involves products and techniques of
which the local people have full knowledge and mastery. Thus the
village craftsman is stimulated to use and develop the
traditional local forms, simply because he sees them respected by
a professional architect, while the ordinary person, the client,
is once more in a position to understand and appreciate the
craftsman's work.

In spite of this, we are witnessing a change that is now
forcing a complete rupture with the past; every concept and every
value has been reversed. For house design in the Middle East, the
introverted plan wherein family life looked into the courtyard
was changed to a plan with family life looking out upon the
street. The cool, clean air, the serenity and reverence of the
courtyard were shed, and the street was embraced with its heat,
dust, and noise. Also, the qa'a [a central, high-ceilinged
upper-story room for receiving guests, constructed so as to
provide natural light and ensure ventilation] was supplanted by
the ordinary salon, and all such delights as the fountain, the
salsabil [a fountain or a basin of still water designed to
increase air humidity], and the malqaf [wind catch] were discarded in the name of progress and modernity.

It may seem that, from the functional point of view,
mechanical air-conditioning was made possible by modern
technology; but we must recognize that such technologies also
have a cultural role. In fact, this role may be even more
important than the function it serves, considering the special
place occupied by the decorative arts in many cultures.

Thus when the modern architect replaced these decorative
elements with air-conditioning equipment, he created a large
vacuum in his culture. He has become like a football player
playing football with a cannon. If the purpose of the game is
scoring goals, then assuredly he can score a goal with every
shot. But the game itself will disappear, and so will any
diversion for the spectators, except perhaps in the killing of
the goalkeeper.

Every advance in technology has been directed toward man's
mastery of his environment. Until very recently, however, man
always maintained a certain balance between his bodily and
spiritual being and the external world. Disruption of this
balance may have a detrimental effect on man, genetically,
physiologically, or psychologically. And however fast technology
advances, however radically the economy changes, all change must
be related to the rate of change of man himself. The abstractions
of the technologist and the economist must be continually pulled
down to Earth by the gravitational force of human nature.

Unhappily, the modern architect of the Third World, suddenly
released from this gravity, and unable to resist temptation,
accepts every facility offered to him by modern technology, with
no thought of its effect on the complex web of his culture.
Unaware that civilization is measured by what one contributes to
culture, not by what one takes from others, he continues to draw
upon the works of Western architects in Europe and North America,
without assessing the value of his own heritage.

In order to assess the value of our heritage in architecture
and to judge the changes that it has undergone, there is a need
to analyze scientifically the various concepts of design, and to
clarify the meaning of many terms that the modern architect uses
freely in his professional jargon, such as "contemporaneity." The
role architecture and town planning play in the progress of
civilization and culture must be grasped. While change is a
condition of life, it is not ethically neutral. Change that is
not for the better is change for the worse, and we must
continually judge its direction. Architecture concerns not
technology alone but man and technology, and planning concerns
man, society, and technology.

In architectural criticism, the concepts of past, present,
and future are used capriciously, and the present is extended to
mean the whole modern epoch. To avoid being arbitrary, we must
establish some standards of reference that involve the concept of
contemporaneity.

The word "contemporary" is defined as meaning "existing,
living, occurring at the same time as." The word implies a
comparison between at least two things, and it conveys no hint of
approval or disapproval. But as used by many architects, the word
does carry a value judgment. It means something like "relevant to
its time" and hence to be approved, while "anachronistic" means
"irrelevant to its time" and is a term of disapproval. This
raises the two questions of what we mean by time and what we mean
by relevance, and to what.

Now, if we are to reconcile chronological time with the
artist's definition of contemporaneity, we may say that to be
relevant to its time, to be contemporary, a work of architecture
must be part of the bustle and turmoil, the ebb and flow of
everyday life; it must relate harmoniously to the rhythm of the
universe, and it must be consonant with man's current stage of
knowledge in the human and the mechanical sciences, and in their
inseparable relationship within planning and architectural
design.

To judge the criterion of contemporaneity, we must sense the
forces that are working for change, and must not passively follow
them but rather control and direct them where we think they
should aim. Physical and aerodynamic analysis has shown that many
of the concepts embodied in the design of houses of the past
remain as valid today as they were yesterday and that, judged by
the same standards, much of what is called modern is in fact
anachronistic. We must determine what is basic and constant and
thus worth keeping, and what is ephemeral and transient and can
be discarded.

Looking to the future, we see that the situation at any
given time largely determines the coming stage in development and
change. Thus there would be no problem were the present situation
of architecture normal, that is to say, truly contemporary. The
future would then take care of itself. But unfortunately that is
not the case, and it is the responsibility of the modern
architect to find a remedy. He must renew architecture from the
moment when it was abandoned; and he must try to bridge the
existing gap in its development by analyzing the elements of
change, applying modern techniques to modify the valid methods
established by our ancestors, and then developing new solutions
that satisfy modern needs.

Author Information

Hassan Fathy, an Egyptian architect, has received the Union of
International Architects Gold Medal, the Aga Kahn Award for
Architecture, and the Egyptian Government's National Prize for
Arts and Letters. The article reprinted here ("Preface," pp.
xix-xxiii), by permission of The University of Chicago Press, is
drawn from Fathy's Natural Energy and Vernacular Architecture:
Principles and Examples with Reference to Hot Arid Climates,
edited by Walter Shearer and Abd-el-rahman Ahmed Sultan, and
published by Chicago for The United Nations University in 1986; copyright
1986 by Hassan Fathy. All rights reserved.